摘要：Alexandra Fedorova, Sergey Blagodurov, Sergey Zhuravlev; Simon Fraser University Contention for caches, memory controllers, and interconnects can be alleviated by contention-aware scheduling algorithms. Modern multicore systems are designed to allow clusters of cores to share various hardware structures, such as LLCs (last-level caches; for example, L2 or L3), memory controllers, and interconnects, as well as prefetching hardware. We refer to these resource-sharing clusters as memory domains, because the shared resources mostly have to do with the memory hierarchy. Figure 1 provides an illustration of a system with two memory domains and two cores per domain. Threads running on cores in the same memory domain may compete for the shared resources, and this contention can significantly degrade their performance relative to what they could achieve running in a contention-free environment. Consider an example demonstrating how contention for shared resources can affect application performance. In this example, four applications—Soplex, Sphinx, Gamess, and Namd, from the SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) CPU 2006 benchmark suite6—run simultaneously on an Intel Quad-Core Xeon system similar to the one depicted in figure 1.
